Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, Down a Country Road

Driving from one place to another is something most of do almost every day. It involves finding one’s way through neighborhoods and highways, suburbs and cities and sometimes a refreshing jaunt through the countryside.

My son has a job at a dog kennel. I was driving him to work this morning. The air was a bit cool which was a vast relief from the humid, sticky air we’ve been feeling due to late summer weather systems.

Winding along the rural roads where we live, I saw a bunch of twisted feathers in my lane. At first I thought someone had nailed a buzzard which we often see around here feasting on roadkill. After passing the carcass, I saw a family of wild turkeys looking kind of spooked and nervous. I slowed down almost to a stop to pass the mother and “teenage” birds. They took flight safely. When I returned that way later I realized what I had seen was a newly killed turkey, not a buzzard. It was just one of those little moments of something suffering that we all see and then forget on any day of the week.

As I was driving, I was listening to Fred Child’s National Public Radio program; “Performance Today”. He featured pianist Bruce Adolph, who hosts a little puzzler each week in which he re-writes a piece of music in the style of a famous composer. A listener gets on the phone and guesses the composer and the piece of music and wins something or other. Today they began the show with the Beatle song, “Nowhere Man” as if written by Maurice Ravel. Very impressionistic and dreamy.

Next he played a piece on the piano that was hauntingly lovely but unrecognizable. The listener guessed immediately that it was written in the style of a Bach choral arrangement. Distinct melodies, soprano, alto, tenor and bass, played at the same time, occasionally hitting the same note, but quite mesmerizing in its complexity. After a couple of tries the listener couldn’t figure out what song it was. Mr. Adolph played it faster and I heard the tune right away, “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair”. I kept yelling at the radio, “Black is the color! Black is the color!” but they couldn’t hear me.

Anyway, it was finally identified and I kept driving. But the truly restful piano piece had put me in an altered state and as I drove past the ripening soy bean fields it seemed like the planets and the sun had aligned in a new way. The green and yellow splashes of soybeans, the fields of dry corn, the trees with their leaves beginning to change color, and the cool air all joined together in their own Bach counterpoint. Then a lovely arrangement of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” started to play on the radio. It was just a lone piano but it spoke to the day.

Who knows why but sometimes the sun and the trees and music in our ears makes tears come. I drove the rest of the way home blinking, wondering at the exaltation of beauty at the end of September and how God speaks to us in subtle ways all the time whether we’re looking or listening or not.